


Now We Are Free

by Cactaceae28



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Crash Landing, Delta Quadrant, F/M, First Kiss, Hopeful Ending, Mirror Universe (Star Trek), Romance, Terran Rebellion, Trektober 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:21:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26745826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cactaceae28/pseuds/Cactaceae28
Summary: Even in the darkest of times, a way forward may present itself. Do you have to courage to take it?
Relationships: Kes/Tom Paris, Mirror Kes/Mirror Tom Paris
Comments: 6
Kudos: 8
Collections: Trektober 2020





	Now We Are Free

**Author's Note:**

> For Trektober 2020 Day 1: Mirror Universe/First Kiss

_“Why do you want to go outside? It’s so ugly out there.”_

That is what they all tell Kes, if she’s caught during her excursions and lets her true intentions slip. They tell her that the outside world is cold, dangerous and ugly, just a barren plain of dust without life. 

They tell her that her skin will tan and shrivel or else will grow red and fall off; that there are marauders who will catch her and drink her blood because there is no water outside for them; that the sun will blind her and she will never find her way back, as well as a whole other host of atrocities so dreadful that she can’t help but laugh at them.

She wishes they believed her when she tries to explain herself, though. When she tells them that they aren’t all wrong: during the day it’s so hot that she can’t leave the shade and she’s always careful to avoid the Kazon whenever they make an appearance. The night however…

The night is beautiful. During the night the harsh ocre tones fade to something gentler and the sky fills with a sprinkle of little white lights, smaller than the smallest pilot in the underground home.

Tonight starts like any other. She leaves the underground, closes the trapdoor and takes a few seconds to catch her breath, feeling a weight fall from her shoulders once she straightens and sees the open plain around her.

Then there’s a booming sound, a flash of light and she can only watch in terrified astonishment as something pierces the darkness and hits the ground making a huge cloud of dust rise up. She debates whether she should return inside or if she dares to investigate, and finally her curiosity wins out. Silently but with quick steps she approaches the dark mole, looking for any movement.

She hides behind a rock just as the door hisses open, letting out a gust of grey exhaust and she ducks her head at the harsh sounds coming from inside. Eventually the dust and smoke clear and all falls silent, so she dares to peak around the corner.

There’s someone lying on the ground with his limbs askew, like he had been dragging himself out when he finally lost consciousness. He looks harmless enough and not that different from the people she knows in fact, so after a minute she cautiously ventures forward, ready to run at any moment, but the pilot doesn’t stir.

When she reaches the ship she realizes that it’s a man with light brown hair, though it is hard to tell with the soot and grime covering him from head to toe. She would have thought him to be Ocampan, if it wasn’t for the stubby, round ear she can see sticking out of his head. She swallows heavily and darting a glance at the lax face, cautiously runs her index finger through the edge; the skin is soft and much warmer than she expected, but it doesn’t look like scar tissue.

There are medical facilities in her home, but the people who are sent there from the sky never survive. She knows that the medics try their best, but somehow she doesn’t want to surrender this person to them; if he had been meant for their biobeds, he wouldn’t have fallen here by her side. If he has any sickness that she cannot treat herself, she can always take him inside later.

She drags the man inside the shade of his ship, which is so dusty that almost blends with the surroundings, and stays by his bedside for as long as she dares, every moment that she has available. For the first two days he slips in and out of a fever and she watches for the signs of the outsider’s illness while resting his head on her knees and giving him slow sips of water that mostly dribble out of his mouth.

Somehow she finds herself talking to him, babbling about her work, asking him questions, making up answers about wherever he comes from. She’s just grown used to the silence she gets in return when one day the fever abates and she’s looking down at blue eyes trying to focus on her face.

<< _Kee_ p tal _kin_ g, ………….?>>

“What?” She asks, taking aback by the strangely mechanic, double-layered sound of his voice.

<<…….………. t _rans_ late, need …………. Keep talking, please?>>

So Kes does, stammering and stumbling slightly over her words. She continues explaining about her day, her father, talks about her home and peppers her discourse with variants of the same million questions she has, now that it seems they may yet be answered. Eventually she runs out of ideas and stops; the stranger looks at her with a frown, and eventually asks tentatively,

<<What ..d you want .. ask of me?>>

His voice sound steadier now, and the double tones have faded so that she can barely make them out if she pays attention. She thinks about it, and then offers him the palm of her hand. “My name is Kes. What is yours?”

The man laughs a loud, relieved laugh that is brighter than anything Kes has heard before inside these halls. He lightly grasps her hand and gives it an odd little shake before letting go. When he answers, there's still a tiny grin on his face. "My name is Tom.” 

\-----

Now that they can communicate, things are easier. She sneaks him water, food and tools each night, and he tells her stories, at first haltingly, then with growing confidence. At times he reminds her of the pets that sometimes get lost in the caverns that lead nowhere and have to be coaxed back into the Ocampan’s living spaces slowly because their first instinct is to growl and snap at their hands when they are found again. She wonders what put that wariness and fear in him. 

\-----

“Which star are you from?” She asks one night, watching him where he has contorted himself into a tiny space below the navigation controls. He lifts his head and curses when he hits the border, breathing heavily for a moment with his eyes tightly shut. Eventually the tension in his frame dissipates, and he returns to what he was doing.

“None of these, actually. I got a look at the navigation records early today, and somehow, I travelled 70,000 light years to end up here.” He chuckles and adds, “the voyage of a lifetime!”

“What was it like?”

“The travel? To be honest, I don’t remember any of it. Lucky me, I guess.”

“No, I mean… your home.”

He frowns and his mouth twists like he has tasted something foul.

“Well Princess, I don’t come from a pretty place. Whatever you are imagining, you better forget it,” he snaps. At her frown, he runs his hand through his hair and elaborates, taking care to sound less bitter.

“My corner of the galaxy is… ruthless and cruel and dark. Everybody is always fighting everybody else and being kind will only get you killed.”

“Things can always get better,” she says, realizing that she can’t deny his words without sounding like an empty platitude.

“No, not there,” he answers like it’s a simple fact. He busies himself with removing a dented plating and trying to repair it, and works in silence for a few minutes. There’s a cool draft coming from the open door, and the rhythmic sounds lull Kes into a drowsy state before he starts talking again, startling her back to awareness.

“You know, a hundred years ago, it was my people who were on top, doing the atrocities. Until some busybody got the bright idea to break the Empire’s rule and try to bring peace; and you know what happened?”

“…they failed?”

“Worse, he succeeded. He got the peace he wanted; and as soon as he died, the vultures swooped in and tore humanity to pieces, then they killed everyone who resisted and captured the dregs that were left. When they stomped every bit of fight left, they put us to work.”

“You were a slave?” She breathes out, suddenly fully awake again.

“I was a _person_ ,” he says with a glare.

She grimaces apologetically, gripping her forearms. He sighs and turns away, and she gets the feeling that he won’t be able to continue talking if he looks at her. She sits up straighter and listens in silence.

“People —humans— don’t stay down for long though. There were some revolts in a space station first, then some colonies; they started fighting back. Eventually, a rebellion was born and soon it seemed like every day you heard about someone who had escaped or someone being punished for trying to escape.”

“This human woman was brought in, Kathryn. She had a contact with one of the freed rebels and she started gathering some followers to stage our own breakout. By then, the rebel movement was growing stronger; there were rumours about some kind of super-ship being constructed near the Badlands. It was probably a hoax, but Alliance scientists were encouraged to find ways to counteract anything the rebellion might do, and this prototype was one of them." 

He gives the metal above him a pat, as if to reassure it. "I won’t bore you with the details: retractable warp nacelles, photonic missiles, parametallic hull plating. A perfect hunter, too small to detect, too tough to destroy. Kathryn coordinated an assault on the operations center of the facility with a small rebel cell; meanwhile, I was supposed to find this ship and steal it or sabotage it.”

His eyes glaze over and there’s a quality to his voice that makes Kes wonder if he’s about to cry, but his voice is mostly steady as he continues, “There was a scientist in the facility. She was Klingon, not fully, but just Klingon enough to be considered one of them. She was… rude and stubborn and sometimes she was even cruel, but she had a good heart, deep down. In another life, maybe we could have been friends. Maybe… but it doesn’t matter now, does it?”

“Long story short, I tricked her, or maybe she let herself be tricked, and I stole it from right under the regent’s nose. The worst part is that I didn’t even have a plan for what I’d do after. I’m not a hero, so it’s not like the Rebellion was my calling, I simply wanted to be free. I was going to drop the ship off with Kathryn’s friend and take my chances on my own.”

“What happened?”

“I made it as far as the Badlands themselves, thought I had picked up a transmission from the main base when something went wrong and I lost control of the ship. Next thing I knew…” he huffs out a disbelieving laugh, “well, next thing I knew I was looking at this cute blond girl speaking gibberish.”

Tom’s grin is still too sharp around the edges to be real, yet somehow a hint of something soft and warm slips into his expression. “All things considered, I guess I’m not complaining.”

Kes feels her heart beat a little louder, and tries not to read any deeper meaning in his words.

\-----

Two nights later, it takes her nearly an hour to weather her father’s lecture before she can sneak out. He has always tolerated her excursions before, but they have grown too frequent and he’s starting to worry; she only hopes he won’t resort to drastic measures like grounding her.

She wants to snatch every moment she can while Tom is still here. His repairs are not going to last forever, and she knows that the stars call to him. Even if he could be accepted among her people, he would not be happy there.

“I was starting to wonder if you had gotten bored with me,” he greets her when she reaches him.

Kes groans and sits next to him, peering at the way his hands move, always sure and steady. Before she realizes what she’s doing, she’s started venting about her father, whose concern feels like a chain sometimes, about how no one inside has any curiosity or any drive, of how sometimes she feels the walls closing down on her and she only wants to get up and run and run, even if it may get her hurt.

“Hey, you aren’t going to get any argument from me there. I fled to the other side of the galaxy, remember?”

“You didn’t flee,” she corrects, “you did the best you could with what you had.” She doesn’t add how selfishly glad she is that whatever it was that brought him here happened, that they can have these conversations and she’s no longer alone.

He shrugs and doesn’t answer. Today he’s working on the exterior so she lays back and looks at the stars.

“Do you think this quadrant may be better than yours?”

“I can’t see how it could be worse.”

“Are you going to try and go back home?”

He doesn’t answer that.

\-----

Another evening, while he’s working on the fried motherboards relying only on the feeble light of the lantern she carries, he asks her:

“What do you think of Voyager?”

“What?”

“For this baby,” he says, cursing when he tries connecting some brightly-colored cables and they spark menacingly. He shakes his hand and continues, “Where I come from, it’s customary to give ships a name, and I can’t even pronounce the Klingon monstrosity she had when I left with her. So I was thinking Voyager.”

“That means… something like traveller?”

“Sure, close enough. Explorer might be closer.”

“I like it,” she answers, but looking closer at his thoughtful frown, she is compelled to ask, “is there another reason for it?

His jaw works, and he avoids her eyes, working in silence for a few minutes before he finally sighs.

“I don’t even know if it’s true,” he warns her, “but Kathryn, she told me the story of the first Voyager. It was a probe humans sent into space before they could even travel to their moon, and it was meant just to travel and send messages back home. It wasn’t meant to fight, or to conquer, but just to seek out new worlds,” he shrugs as much as he can with his hands buried in the mess of wires, “it’s probably just a stupid fairytale.”

It is much more than that, and they both know it.

“I think Voyager sounds perfect.”

\----

Another night, another round of repairs.

“Have you ever seen rain before?”

“What? What do you mean?” He’s so startled that he actually stops to look at her. She feels her cheeks heat up at his incredulous expression, but presses on.

“I found the word in the archives. They say that before the Warming, water fell from the sky and it flowed on the ground and sometimes there was so much of it in one place that you couldn’t see land on the other side.”

“Sure, like an ocean.”

“Have you seen one?”

He shrugs, “No, I’ve never lived long planet-side.” He looks at her downcast expression and sighs, “I have seen rain, though. Sometimes the clouds are so thick that it seems like it’s night even in the middle of the day, and sometimes the sky rumbles with thunder. If you are very lucky though, you might see a rainbow as well…”

He snorts at her awed gasp and puts his makeshift tool aside, turning and opening his hands so he can gesture grandly as he explains wonders she can barely imagine.

\----

It takes only a few more days before the damage is repaired and Tom declares the ship space-worthy again. She looks at him and he looks at her, and she can feel her eyes stinging at the prospect of going back to nights spent alone, back to looking at the sky and wondering if something will ever change.

“I’ll miss you,” he finally says. Her heart lurches and an awful possibility comes to her mind for the first time, something she hadn’t dared to consider before.

“You will come back, though?”

His face falls and she feels like crying when the answer comes.

“Kes, I… this is going to be dangerous, I don’t even know what is out there. I still don’t have a plan for what’s going to happen next. I might not make it.”

“No… you can’t say that. You have to come back, please, you have to promise.”

He shakes his head and his arms twitch by his side , but he takes a step back and simply says, “I’m sorry, but I can’t promise you that,” he looks at her in the eyes, hesitates on the verge of saying something else and finally takes another step back. “So I guess… this is goodbye.”

She holds back a sob and moves towards the hidden entrance, refusing to look back, looking at the trapdoor that leads below, where her family is waiting for her. It will be her turn in hydroponics soon and she’ll have to hurry if she wants to clean the dirt from her face and hands before the supervisor catches her and lectures her again.

This has been one more adventure on the outside that is now over, more wondrous than any she has had before, but now it’s time to go back to her life.

Back to this perfect picture with white walls, lush plants, plentiful food and beautiful people. 

Back to where she’s cared for, where she never has wanted for anything. Where life is easy and nothing ever changes.

Back to ten meters of ground between her and the surface, and an ocean between her and the stars.

She turns around and runs.

\-----

“Take me with you!” Kes shouts, sprinting through the open space between them and for once she doesn’t care about the way her voice carries and who in this barren little world might be attracted by the noise. Tom stops, with his hand already touching the door’s mechanism, and turns.

“Please,” She says again when she skids to a stop in front of Tom, who is looking at her with wide blue eyes. “Please, take me with you.”

“Kes… I… I told you that I don’t think I’d ever come back, that goes for you too, you might never see your family or friends again. It’s going to be dangerous, we might die—”

Still feeling bold and with the adrenaline flooding her veins, Kes puts her hands on his shoulders and uses the leverage to stand on her toes, pressing her lips against his for one long, blissful moment. His lips are rough and chapped, his touch is scorching, but after a moment his hands come under her elbows and he leans down, pressing against her. They fit just right, just as she imagined they would. When they part, she’s still breathing heavily and he’s been struck silent.

“I don’t care,” she says resolutely. “I never wanted this sterile life. I want more, I want to see the stars, I want to travel to other worlds and I want to do it with you. So, please. Please, don’t turn me away.”

He looks at her seriously and she returns his gaze trying to make her resolve clear. Eventually his mask cracks and though his expression is still stern, there is a smile lurking behind his words.

“It’s going to be a lot of work. I don’t want a co-pilot who can’t pull her own weight,” he warns.

“I will learn,” she replies.

“Then I will teach you.”

\-----

Voyager lifts up towards the unknown, leaving behind only a bright trail like a shooting star against the dawn of the brightening sky.

**Author's Note:**

> This story is something of an apology, because I felt bad about Kes and Tom not ending up together in my other Voyager story (this time doesn’t quite count either since they’re alternate versions, but… at least I came closer?)
> 
> At last, Trektober 2020 is here! I have a few stories lined up, so we'll see how this goes! If you want to chat, give prompts or just squeal over canon, you can also check out my [tumblr](https://cactaceae-writes.tumblr.com/) :)
> 
> Finally, thank you to the organizers for making this event and, of course, thanks for reading!


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